Timeframe, this planet is dead.
Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a rocket company kicking around.
Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a rocket company kicking around.
I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to colonize Mars.
Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up.
I think we should be focusing on establishing a space industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars. And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find that we don't need planets anymore.
Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs.
:shrug:
Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
As the below comment alludes to, maybe the answer is keeping a sufficiently bottlenecked society to force that psychological change. But then you're not really recreating the parts of society that people are worried about losing. You might as well start a self sufficient commune here on Earth.
I guess that's not sexy
but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it terribly if leaving became the only option.
So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars as longingly as we do.
This experiment turns CO2 into oxygen and expels CO. How is that “infinitely more effective and eas[y] here on Earth”?
If you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth then… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per operating cycle [2], it also means you aren’t superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has no use on Earth. It’s tremendously useful on Mars.
If you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars.
This is fundamentally false for the device this article highlights. Different chemistries.
> you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars
It’s not. There isn’t oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense. Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
[2] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-mono...
There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity.
There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.